


The Restorer: Vol 2 No 13

by smilebackwards



Category: A Study in Emerald - Neil Gaiman
Genre: Gen, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-17
Updated: 2013-12-17
Packaged: 2018-01-02 13:50:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1057529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smilebackwards/pseuds/smilebackwards
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I killed Prince Franz Drago of Bohemia.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Restorer: Vol 2 No 13

**Author's Note:**

  * For [radialarch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/radialarch/gifts).



> Thanks to rosehiptea for the beta. Credit and thanks to the various folks and sites below from which I borrowed CSS code to format this. If the formatting is bothersome to anyone, you can click the Hide Creator's Style button at the top.  
> 
> 
> Splitscreen, call out box and very helpful code basics: [AO3](http://archiveofourown.org/works/149319?style=creator)  
>  Horizontal line: [Konigi](http://konigi.com/tools/css-techniques-horizontal-rules)  
>  Headline: [3.7 Designs](http://3.7designs.co/blog/2008/06/10-examples-of-beautiful-css-typography-and-how-they-did-it/) 


July 4, 1881 – Vol 2 No 13  
The Restorer

* * *

The bend in the River Moskva. Five days past the quarter turn of the blood moon. Bring matches.

I killed Prince Franz Drago of Bohemia.

You’ll have heard about it in the other papers, the ones you might pay a penny for rather than this complementary one-page underground, scientifically designed by my friend to crumple to dust in your fist.

It was a scandal. The hue and cry calling for my head is still quite deafening. As my friend and I escaped Albion, the churches were full of weeping at vespers. The Church of the Ancient had a sign out front where I have often seen them place passages from the Deep Wonders. _Exult! Salvation is risen from the dark and the Depths,_ and the like. It said, then, _Why?_

Why, indeed. Let me tell you.

The Old Ones are not gods. Or not in the way my mother tried to teach me as a child in the midnight hours, reading out of a tattered book, the title scored off a hundred years ago.

They are not benevolent. They do not perform miracles. They judge as any man may judge—though generally with harsher and more permanent malevolence—and I do not see why we may not judge them in turn.

We did not choose Prince Drago off the street, my friend and I, because of his third eye or the bioluminescence of his hands. It was in a gambling hell that we found him, covered in red blood, a girl twitching weakly beneath him. Out in the very open, as if he never had a thought that such things would come with consequences. We chose him then.

My friend inserted himself quite seamlessly into the Prince’s confidence. He is a master chameleon. I have seen him as a lord and a barrister, a drunk and a chimney sweep, and were he not my dearest companion, I would never have known to disbelieve.

In Albion, to Drago, my friend was Sherry Vernet, actor and theater manager and fawning Royalist. He brought the Prince to one of our performances once. The very first showing of _The Great Old Ones Come._ Drago complimented me most highly on it.

Drago, in turn, took my friend to the madhouses. As if they were an entertainment. 

We did not used to have such madhouses. Not before the Old Ones. I knew a man once—Gregson—who failed to adequately hide his sympathies. He pounded on my door at half past one in the morning and when I let him in, he fell into my sitting room on his knees. “Doctor, help me, it burns!” he said, clutching his head. All my opium and camphor could not help him. His mind broke under the strain and he was sent to St. Margaret’s Sanatorium. He is there still.

When my friend lured Drago to the bedsit with the false promise of innocence, the opportunity to do to another what had been done to poor Gregson, there was a moment between the opening of the door and the time that Drago saw my knives where the Prince’s eyes were filled with such avarice as I have never known. 

It did not pain me to gut him, to feel his cold blood rush out in a torrent over my hands. It was like a geyser, as if the pressure of his blood were far higher than a human, pressing always relentlessly against the skin, waiting for escape. I was quite unexpectedly drenched to the waist in green. 

My friend came over to touch the pads of his fingers curiously against my cheek and they came away tacky. “Splendid,” he said, smiling at me before bending down and making a cup of his hand.

_Rache_ he spelled out on the southern wall, while I considered the autopsy. 

Long have we sought the Achilles heels and jugular veins of the Old Ones. I leave their psychology to my friend, but here, in body, was where the skills of a surgeon were of use.

I am in the process of creating a diagram to appear in our next edition and while it is crude and we have seen that the limbs of the Old Ones often vary in number and placement, I am confident that it yields some valuable data. The left-sided, one-chamber heart. The brittle, secondary spine. When I cracked open the crystal rib block, the pleura tore away more easily than it would have on any mere man.

I should not pen such a confession, and I certainly should not sign my name to it, but I will, at the end, because it was meant for a lesson in responsibility and I will not shirk mine.

If you have read this aright, I shall see you soon. If you have wept for the Prince, that is your choice, and you may curse me to the winds and chase my friend and I from the winters of Siberia to the plains of Leng.

In either case, I remain Most Faithfully  
Yours,  
John Watson (Captain)


End file.
